Those who’ve been using Yoast’s WordPress SEO and/or a separate XML Sitemap plugin, might have came across this strange warning:
The following plugins might cause (xml sitemaps) issues with Yoast WordPress SEO: Google XML Sitemaps.
You see this error when you install an XML Sitemap plugin (eg. Google XML Sitemaps, I use this plugin and got this warning) with already having WordPress SEO installed, and vice versa.
Why you see this error
A kind note before going any further: I don’t want to go into the goods and the bads of any of these two plugins, matter of fact is that both of these two plugins are pretty useful and in high demands in the WordPress community.
So, what causes this error? The WordPress SEO plugin. For those of you who don’t know, the plugin also allows you to add an XML sitemap to your WordPress site, which is ON by default.
The good thing is that when you install some other XML sitemap plugin in your WordPress, WordPress SEO throws an error that reads exactly the same as shared in the beginning of the post, quoting about the conflict details.
The warning message shown by WordPress SEO Plugin has become more aggressive since the last few updates, and now it appears as a big wide box as you can see in the below screen capture:
The FIX
If you want to use the inbuilt sitemap feature in Yoast’s plugin, you need to do nothing except avoiding installing additional plugins to do that. If you want to do it with a separate plugin like I do, just follow these two steps:
- In your WordPress dashboard, navigate to the XML Sitemaps in the SEO section as shown in the screenshot below.
- You’ll see XML Sitemap option checked by default.
You need to uncheck it, and then save the changes.
Voila! You just fixed the conflict. From now on, you won’t see that warning in your plugins section.
A few things to note:
- If you’re using a caching plugin, you may need to flush the cache to get rid of the warning.
- The latest version of Yoast’s plugin may throw the warning again, even after implementing the solution mentioned above. But you don’t have to worry, as you’ve turned-off it’s conflicting feature. The warning message keep appearing just to drag you to use the XML sitemap feature of the plugin. Better ignore it.
If this post was useful, kindly recommend it to other WordPress users. Thanks for your time.
